Feeding Product Catalog Data to Shopping Comparison Engines: Feeding Data Is Only The First Step...

…If you Don’t Have The Other Elements You Are Wasting Money and Time.

Company Profile: www.MerchantAdvantage.com

MerchantAdvantage helps small to mid-sized online merchants manage, feed, optimize and analyze their product catalog feeds to shopping comparison sites, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, PriceRunner and marketplaces as Amazon, Shop.com, and Underbid, (and over 100 other channels) themselves.

Some new companies have popped since we pioneered this “tool” based, do-it-yourself technology”, but none of them actually have the two most important applications/processes of data feed management – analytics and choice.

Just feeding correctly optimized product catalog data is only 10% of what it takes to use over 100 shopping destination sites and marketing channels effectively.

Many companies might have you think that just feeding your data correctly each time is the most important aspect of successful marketing campaigns using these many channels, they are wrong.  Many, many, many online merchants get burned and waste a lot of money on pay per click campaigns using shopping destination sites without increased sales.

Why? Because they think that just feeding data to a channel is sufficient.

Actually, to be successful using these channels you must do the following and have an application that can do the following:

1. create perfectly formatted data to send to ANY marketing channel

2. have choice to where you can send your product catalog data – just sending data to Shopzilla or Yahoo! Shopping is nice, but they might not be the best performing channel for your products.  You should test, experiment and find those channels that sell your product well.  Thus, work with companies that can help you send your data to over 100 marketing channels that are available to any online merchant. they work with over 125 marketing channels.

3. Analyze how your feeds are performing in real time to save money, increase ROI, and increase sales.  You should have a tool that helps you monitor how your product catalog feeds are performing within each shopping destination site and marketing channel, and across each channel.  This tool should measure individual SKU, category and sub category, and click cost performance….daily!

Check out the marketplace for a cost effective tool based solution that feeds and analyzes product catalog feeds to ANY channel you want to feed to and that also does not charge a transaction fee, revenue fee, or set up cost. 

Once you have scanned the landscape, check out www.MerchantAdvantage.com, they are the only ones who can offer all of this to you in the marketplace that is very, very affordable and are adding on new features in 4Q 2007 that will enhance and make your other marketing efforts more efficient into general search engines, as Yahoo!, Google, and others.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. Create perfectly formatted data to send to ANY marketing channel

2. Have choice to where you can send your product catalog data – just sending data to Shopzilla or Yahoo! Shopping is nice, but they might not be the best performing channel for your products.  You should test, experiment and find those channels that sell your product well.  Thus, work with companies that can help you send your data to over 100 marketing channels that are available to any online merchant. There are more than you think....I count over 125 marketing and shopping destination site channels.

3. Analyze how your feeds are performing in real time to save money, increase ROI, and increase sales.  You should have a tool that helps you monitor how your product catalog feeds are performing within each shopping destination site and marketing channel, and across each channel.  This tool should measure individual SKU, category and sub category, and click cost performance….daily!